For how many revolutions of our dream team of heavenly bodies can one speak to the first haunting whispers of autumn creeping in through my wide-splayed windows while I sleep at night…. or the ever-evocative, luminous, pale-gold ball, swan diving in slomo toward the silhouetted, pre-dawn horizon?It’s all been said.Still, it always begs saying.

Autumn’s arrival always draws melancholy to the surface of my heart.Bidding farewell to my life-long besties, Heat and Light.So scarce now, are remaining liberated nights of naked, sensuous, blanket-less slumber, or waking to perfectly warm mornings of outdoor, scantily clad yoga practice.Time to pump up the volume on my anxiety as to how the fuck I will manifest two chords of firewood to heat my hOMe all winter.Yes, I know anxiety is not the be-all, end-all… but it seems to be an inevitable facet of my wiring…. and I no longer have a mama to tell me to take a chill pill.Well… maybe she’s calling out to me from the Astral Plane…. I shall pause and listen, because I need a copious dose of her laid-back Libran medicine right about now.And Ma… since you have boldly proclaimed yourself my Guardian Angel at this stage of the Journey, PLEASE bring me two chords of firewood.And a tall, quenching, golden challise of Holy Water, with which to swallow said “chill pill”.

I only wrote one lone blog while traveling in Costa Rica last month…. And rather than being a poetic celebration of Mother Nature’s verdant, tropical resplendence, or the gentle ecstasy of marinating in spanish… it was about my daughter’s constipation odyssey, and the devastating havoc it wreaked on my psycho-emotional wellbeing.What can I say….?It was a soul-stretching and rigorous month of losing control, coming undone and too much practice holding my own deeply sensitive inner child.Laced with many beautiful and ordinary moments of this under-cover-divine business of Life-Living.One of the greatest gifts was my swollen happiness to come home.A fresh, passionate embrace this sprawling, blessed ordinariness.Since I’ve been home,I feel like a drunk puppy, ecstatically writhing in a dusty heap of opulent, mundane quietude.

I just looked up the word “mundane”, wondering if it was actually a Cinderella’s glass slipper-fit to what I was aiming to communicate:

adjective

1.

common; ordinary; banal; unimaginative.

2.

of or relating to this world or earth as contrasted with heaven;worldly; earthly:

mundane affairs.

I love the word mundane… It always tickles me, because it possesses a trace of fib.Here in Athena Graceland, even the most eyeball-gouging ordinariness is laced with Heavenly Sparkle.It is inescapable.

Like last night, for example.Some might even classify it a “peak experience”….. Seriously.I’m takin’ it to the grave.Well, except I don’t feel the need to be embalmed, boxed and buried…. But I digress.Darkness was quietly engulfing all the secret, overlooked, in-between spaces, as I gave Serena her final hit of “booba” for the night.Satiated, she pulled off and began to wander the small expanse of my double bed.It was getting late, so I offered her the requisite ultimatum, “Booby or bed,” to which she replied “Big Bear,” as she crawled between my legs and snuggled up next to the big, white bear who stowed away with KenPie while he was shopping for rugs for us at IKEA, once upon a time.At first, I was frustrated, because I was exhausted and wished she would cooperate, so that I could brush and floss and flop into bed myself….

But Serena was so…. serene…. laying between my legs, delightfully snuggled up with Big Bear.And then, she took hold of my index finger with her tiny, tender hand!And just held on to me…. looking so peaceful and content.The windows were wide open, and the air flowing in was extra thick and heavenly.It carried the scent of dirt, sweet pine, (and a hint of fresh, impending death) as it had just rained a little.I fought the urge to destroy the perfection of the moment by putting her in bed, reminding myself that it would all end soon enough… My tiny daughter would be a grown woman with her own compelling, urgent and unknowable Life.Instead, I breathed, allowing my body to slowly melt in relaxation. In this deepened state of presence, I became aware of the sensations in my heart.I marveled at the intricacies therein!Seriously people… if my heart were a bottle of red wine, it would’ve been wicked expensive.I felt notes of pure content and whispering joy… mingling with deep, raw ache for the irreparable break with Serena’s father… laced with heavy notes of grief as my heart bled for the still fresh and jarring absence of my own Mama.It all felt so right and natural and harmonious, swirling about in my lucid heart space.Each note so crisp, clear, distinctive.Seemingly disparate… and yet… simultaneous and whole.Dusk’s poetic depth settling on Serena’s little, peaceful face.

I continued to sit in this psychedelic puddle of grace-strewn Existence until Serena was well asleep.Even though I was spent, I felt profoundly wealthy and full.Then I scooped her up and laid her with sublime care into her pack n play bed, at the foot of my own.I had the best night’s sleep I have had in too long to mention.

And now, I am here in this freshly autumnal, audacious-moon-lit darkness… feeling torn apart, churning, burning.On one hand, I am flush with this very compelling strain of content.But also a hissing whisper of desperation to BECOME.To make more of my life.I feel this Immensity… fiercely longing to be fully alive, engaged, expressed through me.I want my fabulous gift with words to lift the minds and hearts of the masses and generate wealth for me and my daughter.I want to be a bold, courageous and inspiring leader, inviting wild and wise women to rise up together and return this world to sacred balance.I want to inhabit the lavish reality of having more than enough money, and the freedom this provides, to make choices from desire, vision and inspiration.

I’ve been blessed with a stellar opportunity to write six *paid!* articles on motherhood, for a chiropractor friend’s website. I’ve written four so far, and I have been very satisfied with them. But then Serena turned four months alive, and suddenly my brain has gone missing! The fifth one was gonna be about the immense potential of raising a girl, given all that I have gone through on my journey, and can now offer to her as profound empowerment. And how this empowerment can ultimately heal and transform the world in the way of LOVE. I am so ignited by this “sermon”… but somehow, despite the well of passion pressing on my heart from inside, I am failing hard! I have written it FOUR times. Each flush contains exquisite gems… but… I feel like I am trying to decant the Ocean in a flimsy crystal champagne flute, which is a massive endeavor… and then my little Buddha-fairy calls to me from the bedroom and my concentration on this task is decimated. My mind is a freshly shattered mirror, and when you try to behold your own face within it, you have a thousand eyes and a hundred and eight gaping, perplexed mouths. Which might be interesting for a second, but ultimately, you need a soft, linguistic sanctuary for your mind to rest after bushwhacking through the underbrush of popular culture and wifi signals, concrete and an overpopulation of stiff right angles! On one hand, it’s wildly frustrating… but it’s also pretty fascinating. It’s a new experience for me to feel so clumsy with words and ideas.

So Athena Graceland is once again my hallelujah-refugee camp. A place where I don’t have to make sense, or sound erudite and literarily competent. (Although I often do…just by accident! 😉 The only requirement here in this psychedelic wilderness, is to BE ME, which thankfully, I can still muster, even as the mother of a four and a half month alive baby saint. You think I’m kidding… I’m not. I’m pretty sure all baby saints behaved as Serena does… with so much grace and patience, effulgent joy and serenity. Yep, Saint Serena is super rad and I’m marinating in thanksgiving. But this doesn’t make the job of caring for her any less labor intensive. God, my body feels suddenly OLD! Creaky and sore and weatherbeaten. Is this why women are supposed to have babies at twenty, rather than thirty six?? Or is it just because I am doing it 98% alone, while earning a meager living doing physically demanding jobs, such as cooking and cleaning, which a) takes it’s toll, and b) doesn’t leave me excess cash flow to fund such replenishing activities as massage, yoga classes, luxurious laps at the local pool…. I still have hope for these things and more. They would do me oodles of good.

I wish I was bringing in plentiful dollars via the use of my incredible mind and courageous, infinitely loving heart, versus my poor tin-woods-woman body, which has hopelessly misplaced the oil can right about now. I have so many gifts and talents of the heart and mind… but I just haven’t quite figured out how to “monetize them”… and honestly, writing that made me puke in my mouth, because I still feel grossed out that I should have to monetize my love. I just want it to happen for me like it happened for my all-time-hero, Matt Kahn. He totally “seeked ye first the kingdom of Heaven”…. and all else was added unto him. He didn’t sit around strategizing who his target audience of wounded SUCKAS was, and how to seduce their imagined weakness. He tended the garden of his heart with steadfast, meticulous passion and suddenly… POOF!!! Life demanded that he share all that he found with those who were hungry to Remember. That’s the only way life makes sense to me. I will just keep stepping deeper into LOVE… and my life will become what it must, as I die to myself and am ever re-born into the heart of Infinity. I just can’t stomach all that marketing bullshit. It’s basically feeding off of peoples’ culturally conditioned myths of brokenness, and capitalizing on it!!!! That’s not okay with me. I’d rather make them soup in my Shakti Pot, and just get by….

But I know there’s another way. I know there’s a way for us all to thrive by communing in our Infinite Light… Celebrating our unique, masterful divinity….

In the mean time, I am chopping the shit out of wood and carrying the F out of water.

And I am mostly hella happy. My body is just a bit stressed. And I am feeling stretched. And as aforementioned, my mind is curiously shattered… at least when I put pressure on myself to make sense… cuz this makes sense, right? It makes perfect sense to ME…

Saint Serena the Benevolent is really allowing me to get into it this morning!!!… which is another ridiculous irony. When I’m trying to write my articles, she wakes up before I can pull my mind together into a unified field of genius… But when I’m writing for my own cosmic shits and giggles, she snoozes away like Sleeping Beauty! But I’m just watching the whole insane play unfold… and laughing about it all. Even when I cry. Like yesterday evening…

I had just led sadhana… (The two hours a week that I exist as Athena Grace… Not “Serena’s Mama”.) I was walking along the red dirt path back to my car, who I named “Faith”, but my Ma insists on calling “Hakim”, because the license plate says HKM!!!!! That woman amazes me in the best way… Because her gratuitous rebellion simultaneously PISSES ME OFF and CRACKS ME UP. Like, Mom, can’t you just call the damn car Faith, already??? And also, don’t stop calling her Hakim, because it strikes up a symphony of funny bones in me, that ONLY my Ma is able to….

But, so, (yes, I know it’s not traditionally “literarily masterful” to start a sentence with “But, so,”… but it felt like the appropriate beginning, so I went with it.) the evening is IN-TOX-I-CATING. It’s not quite twilight…. But the world is beginning to blush in cool, ultra lucid tones. Flocks of regal pine trees sweep the deepening sky, and the air feels like womb-esque perfection– neither warm nor cold, just deliciously alive. This unsayable beauty suddenly reminds me of a poem written by my deceased friend and lover Dan… Something about realizing the meaninglessness of all that he once feverishly chased… uniting with the Truth of Existence– to bear ecstatic witness to the Light that fills the world each new day.

I start to feel the Dan shaped hole in my heart, tears sting my eyes, and I release myself into the heart of the emotion, like a white dove, tossed into the air, suddenly liberated in the invisible currents of space. I reflect on the amazing conversations we shared over amazing food and wine, long, meandering walks on blessed beaches, through holy woods and vibrant green scapes of scintillating springtime. And also the ways that he annoyed me– sometimes talking for days, as though he’d never been listened to in his whole life, which flooded me with a helpless feeling of energetically drowning in seemingly endless and desperate garlands of (beauty-full) words, worlds, stories. This twisty, frivolous wander backward caused me to muse… what WAS it about Dan???…. that compelled me with such immensity…? His HEART, the immediate knowing flooded in. His heart was the softest, most gentle, wise, generous compassionate space in all Creation. Resting in its sanctuary was like being swaddled in chinchilla fur. I could cry now, just thinking of his heart. And his voice reflected it perfectly. So soft, soothing, gentle. Ok, now I am officially crying. And his hands…. perfect extensions of his wide, infinite heart. They spilled with healing love. They touched to the core, without even trying.

Then I thought about all the hearts that I get to commune with every day of my life…. Legendary hearts. And I’m not exaggerating. My Ma. Ed. Serena. Ken. Dara. Deirdre. Karuna. Gosh, it’s stupid to list them, because the list would never end. I am lucid dreaming in an explosive eternal spring garden of glorious hearts. My life is a stream of holy communion (sometimes playfully concealed by silly “problems”, misgivings and futile hopes…)

I am laughing at the one who used to believe that spiritual awakening would be like getting high… Like if I “meditated hard enough”, my third eye would explode into a psychedelic fractal of kaleidoscopic lights, and my body would rush and dissolve in tingling ecstasy. I mean, don’t get me wrong, that would be pretty damn cool… But I’m not renouncing my miraculously mundane existence in this Garden of Hearts, in order to stalk that fleeting, unsustainable “peak experience”. I remember when I heard the spiritual AllStar, Wayne Dyer say, “Man must chop wood and carry water”… I was like hella bummed. I secretly hoped he might be wrong. Chopping wood and carrying water seemed a prison sentence to me.

But here I am, chopping the shit out of wood and carrying the F out of water….

And feeling more sustained, mellow ecstasy, contentment and peace than I ever imagined I could.

And maybe SOMEday, somehow, I will find myself delightfully inhabiting a version of my perfectly blessed life, where I am abundantly sustained by the gifts of my heart and mind, as I blissfully serve the bursting hearts of Humanity. That would be so awesome.

I think the catholics gave purgatory a bad name. It’s actually kind of a sweet place. Not that I recommend it. Not that I’m even enjoying it. But I’m inhabiting it. And now that I am aware that this is where I am, I am opening myself to the possibility of falling in love with it. Purgatory. It’s that no-woman’s-land between heaven and hell. Like hanging out in a broken elevator that plays jazz so smooth, if you hooked it up to an EKG machine, the line would be reminiscent of a horizon slicing across a sky and sea so vast, it could be misconstrued as infinity.

But don’t let the elevator music fool you. It is anything but bland inside ME, as I mill about in this forsaken somewhere inside me, like a cow preparing to birth a handful of wet, spindly calves. My heart feels mostly broken. Sigh. I guess that’s how the light shines through. Sometimes…

And now, my beloved Devis and Devas, Athena Grace LMNOP shall explain what she means when she says she is in purgatory. Well… Yesterday I realized that I don’t know where I “belong”. Spending nine weeks in an ashram in the woods, I have become hyper-sensitized to all of the noise and energy and excessive, senseless motion of the urban environment. “Well, then,” you say, “why don’t you just move your sensitive little butt to Ananda, Mrs. Grace, and live with the God-loving yogis?” Well… maybe I will. But when I imagine being here full time… I panic in anticipation of all this incessant calmness. See? I’m in an unsolvable awkward phase. All I can really do is endure. And keep taking the step that reveals itself from this disorienting dark.

I’m feeling sorry for myself right now, can you tell? Someone PLEASE slap me. I am not here to be self indulgent. So be raw, yes. To be naked, yes. To share… but not to wallow. It’s just that not only do I feel like a cow being swatted along toward the slaughterhouse, as I prepare to return to the Bay Area and fumble into some new chapter of reality, but I also saw a picture of my ex-fiance snuggled under warm covers, holding his three day old son to his chest… and it shattered me. My heart erupted like a volcano of so many contradictory emotions: my own profound LONGING to be a mother, and devastation that it seems SO FUCKING FAR AWAY FOR ME, sadness that he chooses not to include me in his life (yes, I own that I broke his heart when I left him for another man…), joy for him, because I feel him to be truly happy and having what he wants in his life and plus, he’ll be the best dad ever, shame for feeling anything but happy for him and his wife, pure awe for the deep, open love that was transmitted through the photo… I fell to my knees and sobbed for a while. Shrug. Such is life. And so I type these words with a raw and bleeding heart. I just told Ed in a text that I would kill myself right now, if I believed it would solve anything. But I know it won’t. So I march on. He told me to remember God… and I was like “Oh yeah…” (Holding onto the awareness of God seems like clutching at a slippery soap with wet hands!) See, that’s why I keep him around. Because he is a pro at feeding me back my own medicine at just the right moments.

I realized this morning that I can’t remember the last time I felt really, purely “happy”… Not that I haven’t… I’ve just been so busy transforming. And I’m thinking that maybe my definition of happiness is transforming with me. It’s like… well… more of a subtle, sober quietness, than a bone-rattling, skin-ripping high. But then… it’s not like I’m perpetually streaming with zen mellowness. I’m still managing to cry all the time. And yet, I feel that there is a deepening experience of myself taking root. Like more of a consistent contentment in the quiet spaces. I can’t say for sure… because I’m still dissolving. But I know that beneath the struggle, something beautiful is emerging.

Wow. I just stained the page with a big spill from the chalice of my heart. And then I took the world’s deepest, slowest inhale, and I was transported to heaven for a split second. Now I’m back… to this glorious purgatorial sphere of perception. And I’m contemplating how to sum it all up… I just keep looking at life “out there”, and measuring it against life “in here”… and all I feel is “bepuzzlement”. How do I unite these two faces of my one self? I guess this inquiry is the beginning of the next leg of the journey Home. Sigh. It seems to be such an arduous trek. I want to take the express elevator up the Mountain. But I guess if I did that, I would surely be blinded by the intensity of the Infinite Light at the top. I believe the strength and endurance we gain along the climb prepares us for the inevitable, all-consuming rapture. Or maybe we just go on foot for the sheer fun of it…

I could have sworn that today was going to be an auspicious one. First, when I was doing my kicking laps in the outdoor pool this morning, I heard a chorus of holy voices. Immediately I knew the source of the song~ cedar waxwings, my most favorite bird. (But let me set the record straight, I don’t use the term “favorite” as an absolute term, but only to serve as a vehicle conveying passion, enthusiasm, joy… that whole strain of shimmering feelings.) Have you ever seen a cedar waxwing? They always travel in flocks. Big flocks. They are not big birds, they are not especially small birds. They are compact and sleek. When I gaze upon them, I always feel like I am looking through a soft filtered lens~ you know, the kind they use in the movies when they want to illustrate that someone is falling in love? The object of affection shows up so softened and glowing. Cedar waxwings look like that without even needing the aid of Hollywood special effects! Their feathers are modest shade of tawny earth. On their cheeks they have a soft, circular spray of red, downy feathers, so that they are in perpetual blush! They wear black feathered masks around their eyes like sexy, angelic love bandits. They feast on berry bushes, while singing the praises of Heaven. I don’t see them very often (though I do hear them pretty frequently. Their voices are what birds would sound like if they purred!), so when I do, I know I am blessed.

Then, as I was getting out of the pool, a mallard couple landed gracefully on the surface of the warm, crystalline, chlorinated water. I heard their slick landing as I walked, through the frigid, yawning air to the locker room. Then I heard their goofy voices (Duck voices. Is there anything sweeter???) announcing the presence of Love and I turned to prick posterity’s bubble, not believing what I heard. Yes indeed, they paddled their beautiful, buoyant bodies along the lap lines and my heart tickled so bad it cracked open multiple times, like a whole nest full of duck eggs. I heard myself shriek and squeal.

But now I feel lonely. The ducks were a pair. The cedar waxwings were a flock. Athena is alone. Café 504 is busy. How do I know that I am lonely? It’s this feeling in my heart. A black hole comes to mind when I focus on the sensation. This insatiable hole, from which sadness could ooze like an endless honey stream if I let it. But maybe if I just allow it to be… maybe if I create a new story to surround the sensation. Maybe it is a sensation of sacred vulnerability. Maybe. Maybe it is love. Maybe it is not meant to be filled. This must be what the banks of a raging river feel like. I can just let this feeling pour through my shyly awakening heart. It feels like raw desire. Desire~ the reason that we keep casting our rods out into the future, hoping that a particular delicious, gracious, winged carrot will swim up and bite our line… and then this feeling of outrageous yearning will be quelled and real life will begin.

Real.

Life.

Will.

Begin.

I know I talk about this a lot, this illusion of future happiness… but I am determined to break on through to the other side. I am determined to claim my home right here, right now, make my nest, stake my claim, own my throne. Here. Now. Even with this ache in my heart and this auspicious, wishful fishing pole, perpetually on the hunt for carrots that swim with fishes. Isn’t that a pretty image? Inside my mind is a viscous substance, the offspring of the torrid affair between love and water. Aqua-golden and warm as moonbeam jelly. In it swim schools of slender, flaming orange carrots with iridescent scales and exotic, twinkling eyes. Long, flowing fins that flow like silk scarves blowing in tropical breezes. Who wouldn’t want to fish for carrots as beautiful as that?!?! I bet when I finally find the heaven inside, I’ll see Jesus, Krishna and Saint Theresa chillin’ with forties (peeping out from crumpled brown paper sacs) on the end of a pier, dippin their holy poles into the viscous sea of love potion, waiting for a sacred carrot to bite their golden lines.

I have been setting the alarm on my phone to go off every hour, so that I can affirm today’s course in miracles lesson and sit in sacred silence for five minutes, inviting effulgence into the cracks between my habitual bondage thoughts. While I was sitting in sacred invitation, my phone chimed with the revelatory news of a text message. After five minutes of affirmation that “God, being Love, is also Happiness”, I saw that one of my most stellar (and long lost) friends, Amrita had texted me, informing me that she was in town for the day and would I like to meet up later! I haven’t seen her in over a year. So the cedar waxwings and the ducks did NOT lie after all! Athena too shall be graced with auspicious company today!!! When I am with Amrita, I feel like a shooting star. Or maybe the ticklish blackness giggling uncontrollably as light whizzes anonymously through Her endless body of spacious something.

I said that I would tell you more about Glide Church. But honestly, going to church is no more or less spiritual than any other experience that I have. It is confounding to me how spirituality has become this compartmentalized, teensy patch within our glistening existence. Or how bout those people who ardently declare, “I am not a spiritual person”?!?! As if there is anything else to be! I suppose this is another ingenious tactic used to bind our minds to illusion. I am guilty. I seem to be stuck to the concept that finding the light inside will be something that “happens to me… SOMEDAY”. The quintessential Mother of all carrots! How can it possibly be here now? How can it be here now as I sit in this moderately comfortable chair, my butt becoming flattened and stiff, my heart an empty frame hosting a vast, black hole and my mind relentlessly clawing for an understanding that saves my small fearful life, if even for a split second.

Don’t ask me how, but the Light is here, now. Don’t ask me how, but this is IT. There is nothing more. No, wait, ask me. Ask me how!!! Come on, ASK ME!!! LOVE is how. Mostly I hate when people tell me that. Like my friend Dan. He’s all bent on Love. Like a holy obsession. (As far as obsessions go, that one gets the thumbs up from nine point four out of ten angels… but only two out of eighty seven Popes, believe it or not) And when love lives like an elusive concept far from available to me in any given steaming slice of Now, I feel desperate and frustrated. LOVE? Where? All I feel is X, Y, Z…. What’s love got to do with THAT? But I can feel it right now. This feeling of brimming appreciation for all these divine dream creatures, blind as worms, wriggling about in our outrageous fantasy of separation. Is it enough to just say YES to this feeling of reverence, this outpouring of sweetness?

Spiritual. It does not have to be such a serious word. Spiritual. It is spiritual to breathe. It is spiritual to ache. It is spiritual to laugh, to cry, to yearn, to eat, and CERTAINLY to drink high quality cappuccinos(!!!) to pee and poop, to be a couch potato. Ewwwe, I cringed as I wrote that last one. I am not a fan of couch potatoes. But you know what? Who cares? What I am fond of does not equate to what is spiritual. Even the couch potatoes will eventually re-member this MAGNIFICENT light.

AMEN.

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